HOW LANGUAGE WORKS in The St. Petersburg Times

Great notice for David Crystal's How Language Works in the Sunday St. Petersburg Times:

"Crystal's book is comprehensive, but nowhere near dull enough to be a textbook. It's a difficult thing he's doing here: trying to offer a lucid and entertaining study of how we communicate with one another. It's a story with no central character, but with lots of topics to cover and fecund with examples. The tone is conversational, and it gives us the feeling we're back in the classroom again, listening to a master lecturer.

Crystal isn't concerned with correcting our grammar or making us feel like language fools. He just wants us to think about how this works."